Main
Research
Below are some (imperfect) categories of how I am currently thinking through my research, in addition to some related publications. See my publications page for a full list of things I have been an author on.
Designing Place-based and Community-Based Digital Technologies and Networked Infrastructures
In this work, I design and develop place-based and community-based digital technologies and infrastructures to support different ways of living on a changing planet.
This work includes SwampNet, a project aimed to develop and steward technologies for climate justice in Bvlbancha|New Orleans and across the American Gulf South. We started in 2023 as a project to build and re-imagine communication systems in times of emergency, change, and uncertainty. We have since grown to also include work like designing alternative data infrastructures and supporting equitable participation in building just tech futures.
More information can be found at swampnet.info, SwampNet Spring 2024 Zine, and SwampNet Summer 2024 Zine
Jen Liu, Monique Verdin, and Ozone504. 2025. Signals Through the Storm: Designing Networks for Mutual Aid Communities in Southeast Louisiana. interactions 32, 5 (September - October 2025), 54–57. https://doi.org/10.1145/3758320
Liu, Jen, Monique Verdin. 2025. “Networking a Network.” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, no. 28. https://doi.org/10.24926/2471190X.12133.
Jen Liu and Cindy Lin. 2024. What Worlds are We Designing For? In Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium (HttF '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 25, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3686169.3686203
Esther Jang, Nicola Bidwell, Jen Liu, Phoebe Sengers, Naveen Bagalkot, Nervo Verdezoto, Melissa Densmore, Morgan Vigil-Hayes, Shaddi Hasan. 2022. “Situating Network Infrastructures with People, Practices, and Beyond: A Community Building Workshop.” In Proceedings of the 2022 CSCW Conference: CSCW 22’. https://doi.org/10.1145/3500868.3560716
Computing Infrastructures, Climate Change, and Extractive Landscapes
Another related body of work examines how infrastructures change. This includes research examining how coastal communities live with and reimagine networked infrastructures amid planetary change and uncertainty. In my dissertation, “Beyond the Storm: Climate Change, Repair, and Networked Infrastructures in Southeast Louisiana,” I examine the practices of maintaining and repairing networked infrastructures in a time of overlapping social and ecological issues for coastal communities. In my research, I show how the maintenance and repair of networked infrastructures plays a crucial role in shaping how life can be sustained or denied in places facing the accelerated impacts of climate change.
In more recent work, I am studying how infrastructures are changing (or not) to support decarbonization and electrification efforts.
Jen Liu. 2025. "From Sugarcane to Data Centers: Building Solidarities Across Infrastructures." As part of the The Cloud is Dead: A Series on Living with Legacies of Resource Extraction for Data & Society.
Jackson, S., Liu, J., Singh, R., & Passi, S. (2025). maintaining data infrastructures. In T. Venturini, A. Acker, J. Plantin, T. Walford (Eds.) Maintaining data infrastructures (Vol. 0, pp. -). Sage Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529674699.n2
Jen Liu. 2023. Utility Poles of Southeast Louisiana Photo Zine
Jen Liu. 2023. “Under Pressure: Keeping Cables Dry in South Louisiana.” Journal of Environmental Media, Volume 4, Issue 1. P. 91-94. https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00098_1
Remy Hellstern and Jen Liu. 2023. “Lessons from Storms and Wetlands: Rethinking disaster response for communication infrastructures.” Issue 6, Branch Magazine.
Jen Liu. 2023. “Unpacking Intermittency: A Case study from Southeast Louisiana.” Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Computing within Limits. LIMITS.
Jen Liu. 2023. “Living with Intermittent Infrastructures.” Sun Thinking exhibit hosted by Solar Protocol. http://solarprotocol.net/sunthinking/#liu
Jen Liu. 2022. How to get to the end of the world. interactions 29, 1 (January - February 2022), 39–43. https://doi.org/10.1145/3501291
Reframing and Reenvisioning Environmental Data Tools
This research addresses the design and development of digital tools to understand the environment in the areas of community science and digital agriculture.
In my research, I examine questions of who will have access to and will benefit from the development of these tools, in addtion to designing provocations to reshape our interactions and relations with the environment.
Roeven, L., Wolf, S.A., Sengers, P. et al. Analyzing abstraction in critical agri-food studies and computer science: toward interdisciplinary analysis of digital agriculture innovation. Agric Hum Values 42, 1009–1026 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-024-10655-3
Gloire Rubambiza, Phoebe Sengers, Hakim Weatherspoon, and Jen Liu. 2024. "Seam Work and Simulacra of Societal Impact in Networking Research: A Critical Technical Practice." Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference of Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642337
Jen Liu and Phoebe Sengers. "Legibility and the Racialized Legacy of Dispossession in Digital Agriculture"
Proceedings of the ACM 2021 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. ACM 2021.
Jen Liu, Daragh Byrne, and Laura Devendorf. 2018. Design for Collaborative Survival:
An Inquiry into Human-Fungi Relationships. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 40, 1–13. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173614
Jen Liu. 2017. “Field Computing: Wearable Devices for Citizen Science Applications.” TEI Works in Progress: Proceedings of the 2017 Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference. https://doi.org/10.1145/3024969.3025072